Happy and Unhappy Competitors: What Makes the Difference?

摘要

Interpersonal competition is present in all arenas of our life, i.e. within the family, in school, among peers, in the workplace, and in the sports ground. Competition can be an immensely joyful, exciting, and motivating experience that contributes to goal attainment, self-evaluation, development and improvement of the individual, the competing parties, the group and the society. However, it can also be an anxiety provoking, stressful, and exhausting negative experience that leads to interpersonal conflicts and has destructive consequences individually, to the group and ultimately to the society. Competition can be a friendly process in which the competitive parties mutually motivate and improve each other, but can also be a desperate fight full of aggression among the competitors who consider each other enemy. The result of competition can be winning or losing. Winning typically evokes positive emotions like happiness, satisfaction, and pride, but sometimes negative emotions emerge like guilt or embarrassment. Losing, as a potential result of competition, may result in sadness, disappointment, frustration, anger, shame, but can have positive consequences like learning about the self, realizing strengths and weaknesses and increased motivation for the future. There is not "one" competitive process. Competition can take qualitatively different forms and patterns that are determined by individual, situational and cultural factors. The paper will examine the factors that can be decisive in this respect: i.e., the characteristics of the competitive situation and the characteristics of the competing person. These situational and personality requirements will be further examined from a cultural perspective, taking examples from East-Asia (Japan), from North America (Canada) and from Europe (Hungary).